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07 August 2007

Sexism

Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University ... conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

In the first, the scripts were identical except where the candidate described feeling either angry or sad about losing an account due to a colleague's late arrival at a meeting.

Participants conferred the most status on the man who said he was angry, the second most on the woman who said she was sad, slightly less on the man who said he was sad, and least of all by a sizable margin on the woman who said she was angry.

I'm under the impression that sexism is one of the humanwide plagues we all get to stuggle with ad infinitum. That's precisely what makes it hard for me to accept that railing against sexism is a concession along the lines of participation. Perhaps I'm splitting hairs.

I have little choice but to interact with society. So if I expose in my interaction a hostility to sexism, I'm hopefully adding pressure to erode the sexist aspects of our shared culture. Fight culture with culture? Peer pressure tends to work awfully well at a societal level.